I'm baffled. I thought PETA was against keeping animals for any reason. And certainly against making them work.

It has been my experience that most PETA members are city folks, who have no clue how a farm works, or where their food comes from. And I do note, whether conscious or not, a deep seated hatred of mankind and man's mind, especially his ability to choose. This latter facet is typical of the political left, which seems extremely distrustful of anyone else's ability or choices. They appear to see themselves as superior in intellect, and of the opinion that they alone should rule all us stupid people.

And if their policies result in millions of deaths, well, their intentions are pure. Or so they tell us and themselves.

God save us all from the arrogant do-gooders.

I have to agree about their "deep seated hatred of mankind". These idiots have harassed my boyfriend, a medical researcher guilty of the horrible crime of trying to cure things like asthma and cystic fibrosis.

Their hatred seems particularly strong toward Jewish people. A couple of years ago they had an ad campaign that trivialized the Holocaust, comparing Jewish people in concentration camps to chickens. Around that same time their president sent a letter to Arafat politely asking him to please stop using goats in their murderous terror campaigns – mentioning absolutely no objections to his people killing human beings in those same attacks. I wrote to PETA objecting to both the above, and got back an offensive note that basically said “we’re not anti-semitic, some of our best friends are”. Yeah, whatever.

Andrew,

I'm not familiar with this brochure but I thought that it's always been PETA's policy to reject all uses of animals (even as pets). In any case, getting rid of our tractors and replacing them with oxen sounds nuts.

Heather, I think you're being unfair to PETA. Presumably they are harassing your boyfriend because his research harms animals. PETA members think that animal suffering is on a par with human suffering. So, to them, if the harm your boyfriend does to animals exceeds the expected benefits of his research, then they object to it.
Now you might reject their central premise that human suffering is equivalent to animal suffering, but you shouldn't accuse them of a deap seated hatred of mankind.

Also, there's nothing antisemitic about PETA. You say that they compared Jews in concentration camps to chickens, but that's not quite right. Rather, they compared chickens to Jews in concentration camps. There's a subtle but important difference here. They were trying to show how the way we treat chickens is not all that different from how Jews were treated by the Nazis. Their point was that since the latter is unconscionable, then so is the former. This might be fallacious reasoning, but it's not antisemitic.

I don't think I'm being the least bit unfair to PETA. They trivialized the Holocaust in their ad campaign for no good reason; if the chicken situation was really so horrible, don't you think they could have figured out a way to express that without dragging the Holocaust into it?

And what did you think of PETA president's decision to write a polite letter to Arafat protesting PLO terrorists blowing up a goat, without expressing even the slightest bit of concern for the human Jewish children and other Israeli people that those same terrorists have targeted? I wish I had saved the letter I got back from them, because it just reinforced my opinion of them as insane, hateful anti-semites who want to force the rest of us to live according to their personal beliefs.

PETA members are, of course, entitled to their opinions. If they want to avoid all medical care and treatment that resulted from animal research, that is just fine with me. I hope they won't withhold those services from their children but I suspect some of them would. It's hard to imagine what kind of parent would rather let his/her kid die than use a cure developed via animal research, but I'm sure they are out there. I'm just glad that in this country, people like my boyfriend have the freedom to work on improving human lives and easing human suffering.

Heather,

I don't think they were trivializing the holocaust. PETAs goal is to shock people out of their complacency. It is to get people to realize just how awfully animals are treated. The Nazis imprisoned, tortured, and executed millions of Jews just as we routinely imprison, torture, and execute animals. The analogy is fairly strong.

I also think people have overreacted to the letter to Arafat. PETA, after all, is dedicated to representing the interests of ANIMALS. There are plenty of other organizations that represent the interests of people. I'm sure that the members of PETA don't condone suicide bombing. But as members of PETA their job is to petition on behalf of the animals. In that context, their letter to Arafat made perfect sense.

Here's another way to look at it. Suppose I run an agency that represents relief workers, and that one of these workers gets killed in some civil conflict. I might write an angry letter to the warring parties explaining that they should leave the relief workers out of it. By doing this, I'm not necessarily being insensitive to the civil war -- I'm just standing up for the people I'm supposed to represent.

The analogy is "strong" only to people like you who choose to trivialize the Holocaust and to exploit the deaths of millions of human beings to "shock" people, with absolutely no regard for the feelings of the human beings affected by the Holocaust.

Bottom line - PETA's ad campaign upset my grandmother, whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. As a result, they, and now you, have earned a permanent spot on my $h!t list.

Their/your inability to communicate your thoughts about the way animals are treated without dragging the Holocaust into it clearly reflects a failure on your part. If you can't explain how "bad" something is without resorting to nazi analogies, then it must not really be that bad.

I have nothing more to say to you.

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